Before Salvation
by Arctic Banana
Summary: As everything bad that could happen did, Vetra became more and more convinced that she'd made a huge mistake in coming to Andromeda.


_I wrote this back in September right after reading Nexus Uprising, apparently. I found it while condensing and cleaning out my fanfiction folders. The only guess I have as to why I didn't publish it is that I read Nexus Uprising in its entirety during a week long dogsitting job where the wifi doesn't work and then forgot about it by the time I had internet again. Or maybe I wanted to do more with it. It seems incomplete. I dunno.  
_

 _I skimmed it to make sure it was complete but didn't actually edit it beyond that, so if there are any errors that you see, let me know._

* * *

That moment of dire fear on Sidera's face when Tann's announcement completed was enough to break anyone's heart let alone her sister's. Sid had been terrified of cryostasis from the beginning and it had taken a lot of gentle coercion from both Vetra and an understanding member of the life support team to get her to calm down enough to go under. When she was woken up 600 years later, she was confused and just as scared as she had been before, only this time she didn't know what was going on or why Vetra was so concerned. When Tann announced through the stationwide intercom that nonessential personnel were to be put back in cryostasis effective immediately, it was obvious that meant them both.

Sid was shaking like a puppy at the vet and didn't even try to fight back against the tears that stained her face. "I don't want to go back in cryo!" she shouted when Vetra attempted to comfort her. "What if I don't wake up this time?"

"You're going to wake up, Sid," Vetra promised her. She held her close, trying to hide from her sister the fact that she herself was about to cry. "I'm going in with you. You won't be alone," she promised.

Truth be told she had the same fears that Sid had about not waking up, but she didn't want her sister to realize it. What if this station never recovered and they were kept in stasis forever? What if something serious happened and there was no one left to wake them up? What if the Scourge hit them again and they were both killed before they ever even knew what was going on? All were valid concerns, the latter more so as it had actually happened already and could happen again. It was the reason Vetra had demanded Kesh find some use for Sid to justify waking her as early as they did out of fear that something might happen and her sister would never have a chance. This brought on a new fear that made Vetra feel like waking Sid was for more selfish reasons related to her own needs than her sister's. Maybe it would have been more humane to have just allowed Sid to sleep, completely unaware of what was going on.

It wasn't the first time she had debated with herself if anything she'd done was really for her sister's well being or if she'd ruined Sidera's life in an attempt at keeping her own peace of mind. Maybe they would have been better off staying on Omega. As hard as living was there, at least Vetra had the opportunity to work for food rather than being given the options of starvation or a sleep they might never wake up from.

Where was Kesh? Vetra needed her support. It was the only support she had in Andromeda, so of course Kesh would be away when the need for her to be around would arise. She would be able to talk to Sid, convince her that maybe mandatory cryostasis wasn't all that bad given the alternative, and she'd maybe be able to convince Vetra of the same thing.

Then another announcement came over the loudspeakers, only this time it wasn't Tann's voice on the other end. "This is Calix Corvannis," the voice said.

 _Oh shit...I know that name,_ Vetra thought to herself.

"And I am here to tell you all to say no. Say _no!_ Resist the order to return to stasis!"

Sid noticed the bewildered and horrified look on her sister's face. Wiping one eye with the back of her hand, she asked, "What's going on?"

"I don't know," Vetra replied. _But whatever happens next, I don't think we're safe here…_

* * *

As it turned out what happened next was fucking armageddon. They'd managed to find a safe place to stay out of the way of the civil war breaking out all over the Nexus with a few like-minded individuals. There was a salarian who seemed to be in such a state of shock that a woman who identified herself as a medic had to rush to his side to make sure he hadn't just suffered the salarian equivalent of a stroke. There was a man who kept shouting and angrily condemning the rioters. Vetra wished he'd shut up because some of the things he was saying were clearly scaring Sid. She wasn't the only one who seemed to think so. Another turian was glaring daggers at him, but he either didn't notice or didn't get the hint. There was also an engineer who didn't seem scared, more resigned to his fate than anything. She'd later learn that his name was Gil Brodie.

"Could you maybe shut the fuck up? You're scaring the kid!" the turian finally snapped.

"Yes. Thank you," Gil replied. He said it so softly that barely anyone could hear him.

"Does anyone here even care that they're destroying the station?" the ranting man asked. "We're strained enough as it is! Now we're all going to die because a few assholes didn't want to go back to sleep!"

"Oh I'm sorry, but when the call to volunteer to willingly go back into cryostasis came, where were you?" the medic asked. The man remained silent. "Exactly. None of us wants to go back on ice. We all made that perfectly clear already. They're just being more resistant than we are."

"Vetra, are we going to die?" Sid's question was so quiet that clearly only she was supposed hear it. Vetra looked at her sister, who was still in tears, even more afraid than she was before, and clearly concerned that this was their last day of existence.

Vetra didn't know how to answer that question. She wanted to say no, but if she did and it turned out to be a lie, she'd feel like she was betraying her. Instead she pulled her into an embrace and held her there.

She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned around to see the engineer offering her a water bottle. "Tell her it's going to be okay," Gil said as she accepted the gift, a grand gesture with the shortages in mind.

"Thank you," Vetra said in earnest before offering the water to Sid.

Before she could say anything of the like, a security officer stumbled into the room, blood pouring down his uniform to the floor. It was clear he'd taken a gunshot, but he was so covered in blood that it couldn't immediately be detected where.

The refugees immediately went on edge at the sight of him, worried that things had escalated so much that he'd just assume them as hostiles and kill them all on sight. The man fell to his knees, his shotgun clattering across the floor and stopping in front of Vetra. No one said or did anything. They were all in too much of a horrified stupor to know how to react.

The guard said the first word: "Help."

Immediately the medic rushed to his side, flipping him over onto his back so she could determine just where he'd been shot and locating the wound somewhere in his abdomen.

"The fighting just came to us!" the ranting man started up again. "That fucking guard is going to lead them right to us! We need to get him out of here before they find him!"

"No one is following the guard!" the medic snapped. "If we throw him out without trying to help him, we'll be just as bad as the rioters!"

"But we can't be seen with him! If those upstarts see us helping him, they'll kill us! If security sees us with him, they'll think we shot him and also kill us!"

"I don't know about you, but I'd rather be killed trying to save a life than live as a coward," the turian said threateningly.

It was clear that a fight was about to break out between the two. Vetra quickly scooped up the shotgun from the floor and fired a burst into the ceiling to get their attention. Sid flinched from the sound, but seemed to think Vetra knew what she was doing because seeing her armed seemed to calm her a little. "We came here to get away from the fighting! Knock it off!"

"Are you threatening us?" the man asked accusingly.

Vetra cocked the shotgun threateningly. "I said, knock it off," she warned him before lowering the barrel of the gun.

The turian eyed the gun in her hand. He noted that she was holding it in a way that would injure herself with the kickback and that it was not a pump action model, which meant that in an attempt to be intimidating what she had really just done was eject the thermal clip, which she seemed to have realized if the subtle look of _oh crap_ she had on her face for a split second afterwards was any indication. Clearly she had no idea how to handle shotguns and was just bullshitting her way through this. He almost laughed in admiration at her tough girl act.

"I'd listen to her," he warned instead. "She seems serious."

The man must have been as clueless about shotguns as she was because he seemed reasonably intimidated by the shotgun aimed in his direction.

"Please, if we're all done arguing, I need someone to help me!" the medic pleaded. Gil seemed at a loss, Sid was still shaking in the corner, and the argumentative man looked too ashamed to be of any help.

The turian crossed the room to Vetra and took the shotgun from her and the thermal clip off the floor, which he loaded into the gun's chamber before handing it back to her. "You'll find it's more dangerous when it's actually loaded," he said to her quietly before turning to the medic. "I've got some residual first aid knowledge for bullet wounds leftover from service. What do you need me to do?"

Vetra looked in shock that he had noticed what she'd done, but couldn't be too surprised considering she was probably the only turian in existence who had to learn how a gun works by trial and error. If spirits were real, thank them all that he was on her side and didn't try to take advantage of that embarrassing mistake.

Gil leaned over and whispered to her, "You might want to put the gun down. He does have a point that if security comes in here and sees this, they might think we were the ones who shot him."

Vetra hated to agree that the asshole was right in this case, but she wasn't about to get shot or arrested in front of her sister over a simple misunderstanding. She placed the gun carefully on the floor and stepped away from it so it would be clear to anyone who walked in that it was the guard's gun and not one of the many pilfered weapons currently in the possession of the rioters.

She made sure it was close enough that the turian currently trying to stop the bleeding while the medic applied emergency medical attention to the fallen officer could grab it if someone came in who wasn't security. She would rather someone who actually knew what they were doing have it than risk her sister's life by taking it up herself.

Hopefully though, she was just being overly cautious and the shotgun wouldn't be needed.

* * *

It had been a few months since the uprising. The only good thing that seemed to have followed in the aftermath was that enough people decided to up and leave that no one who stayed behind was asked to go back into cryostasis. The people who remained were no longer considered nonessential personnel, anyway. They were needed to clean up the wreckage that the rioters had left behind for them to salvage. It had taken months to try to put a dent in fixing the damage caused to the Nexus by the Scourge and a few hours for a civil war to undo all their progress.

As Vetra helped scrape through the rubble and catalog what supplies were left, she had to wonder what their endgame was. Leaving clearly was not their idea, it was Tann's, though he claimed the contrary to try to make himself look like less of a monster for sending people to their deaths. They had intended to stay on board the Nexus after the rioting subsided and whatever goal they had in mind was reached. But how did they expect to survive on a ship that they had intentionally destroyed? Hydroponics had been burned almost to the ground. Much needed supplies were taken or destroyed. People who had nothing to do with the riots, people much like herself and her sister and that small group of survivors they had taken refuge with, had been killed just for standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. She knew their demands were not unreasonable in their circumstances, but the way they went about demanding them just seemed ill thought out in hindsight.

She had to be thankful that her position was considered a role of high authority. Funny how back on Omega, keeping track of supplies would have been considered menial grunt work, but in a system of near starvation she was revered as a god who needed to be appeased by anyone who wanted something.

People would come to her all the time begging for her to let regulations slide and slip them something. Not surprisingly she got a lot of requests for alcohol, but occasionally she'd have some more well meaning requests. A medic might ask for more painkillers than was allotted according to the rationing system for someone who had been injured in the rebellion because their patient was in so much pain that they were begging for death. Someone might ask for a little bit of food of opposite chirality that they obviously couldn't eat themselves because they just couldn't stand to sit and watch a friend go hungry every night.

In cases like that, she quietly gave them what they wanted. As long as she didn't take too much no one would notice it missing anyway since so much was still unaccounted for that they had yet to figure out what was still there.

Soon it became known in certain circles that if you needed someone sympathetic to give you something you genuinely needed but couldn't get, you went to Vetra Nyx. She remembered to stay careful enough that no one could prove it really was her stealing rations and never took too much at once. Rumors that she might have been stealing had already made their way to Tann once before, but the officer sent to investigate turned out to be the very one that they had saved that night of the uprising. He clearly remembered her being there because he reported the rumors as unsubstantial without even bothering to do a thorough investigation.

Or maybe he had found enough evidence to implicate her after all, she realized as she saw the new security director himself approaching her with a woman she recognized as Lieutenant Sajax following him. Sajax didn't seem well and was coughing. Were things really so bad that they had to force people to perform their duties while sick now?

"Vetra Nyx?" Kandros said as he approached her.

 _Shit. Stay calm. You can do this,_ she told herself, remembering the harsh penalties that had been imposed after the uprising for those caught stealing. They didn't take into consideration the whats and whys as to why someone would steal and regarded it as seriously as murder.

"Can I help you, sir?" she asked. She kept her voice level and pleasant. She was good at feigning obliviousness which had kept her out of trouble before in similar circumstances. She just hoped that it worked now.

To her surprise he didn't immediately arrest her and instead handed her a datapad. "I need you to find this for me," he informed her.

Vetra looked at the datapad, but it wasn't a requisition order like she'd expected. Instead it said, _She needs antibiotics, but the medics can't give us anymore. They told us to see you,_ as well as instructions from a medic underneath for more antibiotics than were currently permitted to be given to any one individual.

Kandros must have realized that this might look like a sting operation, which would explain why he'd brought Sajax along so Vetra could see for herself that she really did need the antibiotics. She'd heard from Kesh that the ventilation to part of the station had broken down over the last couple of days and a few people had gotten upper respiratory infections from it, which caused an antibiotic shortage until the resident chemists could manufacture more to treat the outbreak of infection. Because of the shortage a ration was instated and people were expected to just take what they were allowed to be given and then tough it out until they got more, to the protest of the medical staff who complained of the very real danger of creating antibiotic-resistant contagions this way. Sajax must have been in the worst part of the station because she clearly looked like she couldn't wait the week or so it took them to finish producing something viable.

Vetra nodded and handed back the datapad. "I'll just go find that for you," she replied before walking down the rows of storage crates and shelves full of requisitions minor enough that they didn't need to be kept under lock and key, towards the back where the more important stuff was hidden.

Kesh had vouched her trust of Vetra enough that she'd been given the necessary permissions to enter such rooms. Kesh was also aware of her black market reputation for sneaking supplies around, but if she disapproved she didn't say anything. Vetra looked to make sure no one was close enough to see her punch in the keycode (couldn't have just anybody capable of walking in and out of medical storage, after all) and immediately found what she was looking for.

She stealthily hid her back to the camera and hovered over the shelves so it couldn't be seen what she was doing, though she knew no one would be looking at the footage unless someone reported something was missing, and grabbed a bottle of antibiotics and another bottle of the much less valuable low-grade immuno-boosters that were often given out in lieu of proper medication. She emptied the immuno-booster pills into another bottle and poured out just enough antibiotics to get Sajax through the week into the now empty bottle. This way if anyone saw her giving Sajax something they'd just assume she was giving her something to make her feel better until she could get the real medication she needed.

As Vetra handed the disguised antibiotics back to Sajax, she realized the implications of such a gesture. Kandros would be grateful to her for helping out his lieutenant which could ingratiate her to him and make him a helpful ally in the future, but by doing so she also confirmed to him that she was breaking rules and giving away things she shouldn't. If someone else less scrupulous and less careful were doing the same and giving people anything they asked for regardless if they truly needed it or not, she could take the blame for it.

"Thank you," Kandros said with a genuineness to his tone. He started to lead Sajax away as she started up another coughing fit that was strong enough to make her cough up blood. "Come on. You need to go lay down. I'll give someone else your shift until you're feeling better."

Vetra watched her wipe the blood off on her uniform as Kandros lead her back to wherever it was she was sleeping while the ventilation was fixed, likely in Kandros' room so he could keep an eye on her.

How far had they fallen that she had to be afraid of the very real implications that something so innocuous as giving a sick person antibiotics could land her in a prison cell?

* * *

Like most people on the middle to lower rungs of the station's hierarchy, Vetra and Sid didn't have their own room to sleep in. Tann had spun this story about sacrifices and the greater good to try to sell people on sleeping in hallways and closets, but it was easy for him to say this when he got his own apartment to himself, which he had been so quick to claim after the rebellions she might add.

Kesh as always had been ever kind enough to provide for the two of them, at first during the early days of their awakening allowing them both to sleep on the floor in her "office" (really just a closet full of tools and scanning equipment that probably didn't even work anymore that she called an office until she got her current, more suitable one) and then after somehow managing to convince Tann that she was important enough for her own room (which took both Addison and Kandros' support of her work's importance to the station), allowing them to sleep in her own apartment.

It wasn't exactly a party- Kesh was in and out all the time, making noise as she went. During the day she would be somewhere on the station proactively repairing things with her teams. During the night when she was more likely to share the room with Vetra and Sid, she decided to make herself useful by inviting everyone on the station to drop off their broken work equipment or electronics and she'd stay up most of the night fixing them while most people were trying to catch a few hours of much needed sleep. Sometimes she'd loudly argue with Tann over communications and wake them both up. Sometimes one of the engineers in her employ would stop by to check on her and make sure she was okay since she wasn't getting much sleep.

To her credit, Kesh knew and acknowledged that she wasn't a very good roommate and tried to be quiet, but sometimes it couldn't be helped and they'd both be awoken to the sounds of metallic banging and loud swearing. Vetra never complained because it was still better than sleeping on power tools, and Kesh was still somehow quieter than most krogan anyway.

She might not have been a good roommate, but Kesh was a very good friend. She was always willing to sit back and listen to Vetra rant about something or another, and whenever Kesh caught Vetra crying, she'd just tell her that krogan don't cry. When Vetra pointed out that she wasn't a krogan, Kesh would always reply, "Says who, genetics?" in the most sarcastic tone imaginable, which often made her laugh. She took this response to be the krogan form of a compliment, which oftentimes made her feel a little bit better at least.

Throughout all of this, Sid said not a word. She managed to keep up her usual chipper attitude and pretend nothing was wrong, though whether she did this because she genuinely believed that their rock bottom situation would start to improve soon or if it was a front to try to keep her older sister in high spirits, Vetra didn't know. Her behavior was at least a far cry from the scared little girl she had to comfort in the closet during the rebellions, almost as though Sid thought the worst of this was already over.

Speaking of Sid, as Vetra awoke to the sound of a welding torch in the other room, she wondered how her sister managed to stay passed out through all the noise. She must have been just that tired that it didn't even cause her to stir because she still looked as sound asleep as a newborn turian chick swaddled in a blanket.

Vetra carefully pulled her arm out from under her sister's head and stood up quietly, locating her boots and exiting the bedroom area. Kesh stopped welding some kind of electrical scanner back together when she heard the door open.

"Sorry," she apologized, knowing instantly that she was the reason for Vetra's current bout of insomnia.

"Don't apologize. I think I'm just going to go walk around for a little bit," Vetra replied.

"Don't let security catch you. You don't have clearance to be out after curfew," Kesh warned.

"I know," she replied.

Outside the dimly lit apartment there was barely any lighting at all. In an effort to conserve power most of the station was dark, including places where people were normally expected to be able to see, such as hallways. They had to rely on flashlights to get anywhere and there were countless cases of people falling down stairs that they couldn't see or walking into walls when they couldn't tell if the hall was coming to an end. At least one person had managed to flip over a railing in Hydroponics and fell several feet onto solid ground, narrowly missing a fragile seedling and thankfully not hurting himself too badly. He'd gained some infamy as a result of his friends teasing him for his mistake to the point where he'd be forever known to the Nexus as "Tumbles the Plantkiller".

Thankfully none of the injuries had been serious or life threatening. Yet. Vetra couldn't use a flashlight at the risk of drawing attention to herself and kept one hand on the wall as she walked for guidance, forever concerned about becoming known as Tumbles 2.0, the one who actually died in the fall.

She felt something crunch underfoot and heard a pained yelp. Vetra stepped back apologetically when she realized that she'd just stepped on the leg of a salarian trying to catch a few hours of sleep before he had to return to another grueling 20-hour shift. He was yet another of the displaced who couldn't find a place safer than the hallway to sleep and probably thought he was out of the way at the side. Like most turians, Vetra had somewhat decent night vision as befitting of a species that once utilized the cover of dusk to hunt for food, but it only benefited her when she was actually paying attention.

She looked at the salarian apologetically. "Sorry," she whispered before continuing onward. He just seemed resigned to being walked on every time he tried to sleep and ignored her apology. _Someday hopefully you won't have to sleep in a hallway anymore,_ she thought to herself.

She made it to Hydroponics and froze when a flashlight flickered on and caught her in its beam. Kandros stood at the other end of the light, likely making a night patrol to make sure no one messed with any of the plants that they so desperately needed to thrive right now. A few of his security detail walked around through the area, keeping an eye out for the same reason.

"Out for a walk?" Kandros asked.

"Can't sleep," she confirmed. "Kesh is being loud."

Kandros flicked the flashlight off and motioned her closer. "Vetra Nyx is here. She's not trouble," he announced over his radio. To her he added, "Don't wander far from here. I still can't have you wandering around the station unaccounted for at night. If anything were to happen to you it would be on my head."

"Got it," she agreed.

Vetra noted his worry was less of what she might do and more what someone might do to her and shuddered. She'd heard unpleasant rumors of things happening to people, usually women, who wandered out at night. Security was tighter, but they couldn't be everywhere at once, and by the time someone tipped them off that something was wrong and they got there, the damage was usually already done. They were just rumors of course, but rumors were sometimes cemented in truth and she was not so skeptical to disbelieve that at least one of the stories actually happened.

"I won't go farther than Hydroponics," she promised. Kandros nodded and went back to his patrol.

Given his reasonable concerns, he really should not have let her go after catching her out after curfew. Not only was he right that someone might see her and try to grab her (emphasis on try, since she wasn't the helpless little girl that her father had abandoned on Omega anymore), but if Tann found out he'd caught someone walking around after curfew without the proper permissions, he'd be furious.

There wasn't really a punishment in place for being caught out after curfew. You pretty much just got escorted back to your room (or a room, depending on the circumstances) and got a slap on the wrist and an order not to do it again. Kandros should have dragged her back to Kesh's apartment so the krogan could look up and see her escorted back by security and mumble, "Told you to stay hidden," before going back to work.

Thankfully it was Kandros who had caught her and not someone else. Kandros had reason to keep her on his good side after she helped Sajax make it through the week and later forged paperwork to get him a new armor requisition after one of the very few unruly krogan who remained on the station bodyslammed him off a balcony and shattered his chestplate. There were some perks to being needed.

Vetra found a bench to sit on (or was it a bench? She could have sworn there wasn't one here before and it was too dark to tell what she was sitting on) next to a few budding plants within full view of the security team scouting the area. She didn't know if it was an illusion caused by the existence of the blossoming flora, but she felt like it was easier to breathe in this part of the Nexus.

She thought of her sister and almost felt bad for not bringing her along, but she wanted Sid to get as much sleep as she could. It almost seemed peaceful here, ignoring the fact that she was sitting on what may or may not be a bench in the middle of Hydroponics in a blackout. She couldn't help but feel the darkness wasn't that great for the plants. Obviously they should be able to handle the rigorous day/night timer they were on, but so many of them were so fragile and their deaths could threaten the entire station that she was surprised anyone risked it. They must have been that hard pressed for power that they could barely afford to take care of their own livelihood.

She was blinded again by a flashlight that lingered on her. The turian on the other end not very subtly shown the light up and down her, checking her out and possibly either hoping the light disoriented her enough that she didn't notice or didn't care if she noticed. She wished she could tell who it was so she could complain to Kandros later, but she was too blinded to see and he walked away by the time her eyes adjusted again. She was more than a little tired of random guys checking out or propositioning her. There were a lot of lonely people on the Nexus right now, apparently.

She must have fallen asleep there because the next thing she knew was the station day cycle starting up and Kesh coming to get her and carrying her back to her room. "Sleep in a little," Kesh ordered. "I think storage can function without you for a couple of hours."

* * *

The sound of synthetic rubber bouncing off a hard surface echoed through the near-empty storage room. A small ball bounded off the wall and came back to Vetra's waiting hand. She tossed it again, watching eagle eyed as it bounced off the floor, then the wall, then came back again once more. She'd found the ball sometime after the chaos laying on the floor among various scattered and damaged belongings that had been thrown aside or dropped in the haste to loot anything within reach during the uprising. She wasn't really one for looting, but she didn't think anyone would miss a small rubber ball. It looked like one of those cheap ones that kids would get for a few credits from machines in front of grocery stores, anyway.

"One of those days, huh?" Gil asked her. He had a box that he was filling with parts from the storage. It was nice to see that all those degrees in engineering were coming in handy so he can be another engineer's errand boy. Vetra responded by heaving a huge sigh. "Yep. I know how that is."

She threw the ball once more and watched it hit the wall at the wrong angle. Instead of coming straight back to her it bounced off a crate and rolled to a stop on the floor out of reach. She had no drive to get up and get it again just yet. She had no drive to do anything. If it weren't for the fact that she was the only one here to look after her sister, she probably would have ended up one of the post-uprising casualties. She was thankful never to have run into any bodies herself, but she heard so many stories of people showing up for shifts only to find coworkers that had blown their brains out or hung themselves in a storage closet. One of her own friends had recently jumped to his death off of some unsecured scaffolding in the middle of the night. They ruled it an accidental fall caused by low light conditions, but her last conversation with him was worrying enough that she knew better.

She couldn't blame any of them. Was anyone coming at all? What became of the pathfinders? What of those who participated in the uprising? Tann would have everyone believe that they all died horrible deaths on a dead planet, but she couldn't bring herself to believe that as a truth, not with numerous reports that they'd somehow managed to eek out a meager existence on a lawless planet somewhere. She wanted to cling to some belief that this wasn't all how Garson's dream was to come to an end, with people dying slowly in horrible ways.

"VETRA!" her name could distantly be heard shouted from the other side of the door. Seconds later the walls shook when a heavy force collided with the door from the other side.

"It's a manual door, jackass!" Vetra shouted towards the door. That door had been set to "manual" rather than "automatic" since they awoke from cryo a year ago, and yet Clarke still always ran face first into it with the expectation that it would automatically open for him.

The door opened and Clarke almost fell on his face a second time. "Vetra!" he shouted in excitement. "A pathfinder just arrived!"

Gil turned his head away from the box of parts at the overheard conversation. "Very funny, Clarke," Vetra replied in annoyance.

"Vetra, I'd never joke about this! The Hyperion just docked! The human pathfinder is _here!_ "

Vetra looked at him to gauge his seriousness. Clarke was a ball of excitement, but there was genuineness to this excitement. If he were trying to play a cruel prank on her, he was doing a very good job at convincing her.

"There's really a pathfinder here?" she asked. She tried to keep her sheer exhilaration at these words to a minimum. She wanted to believe Clarke, but after so long and so many failures she didn't want to get excited only to find that it really was just a cruel prank.

"Yes! Tann is speaking to him right now! Call Kesh if you don't believe me!"

Vetra's ball became forgotten as she used her omnitool to ping Kesh while Clarke ran off to tell everyone else within the vicinity. She waited, nausea rising in her stomach like an excited child on their first day of school, when she finally got the response she wanted.

 _Yes, there really is a pathfinder here. Come see for yourself._

"He's not bullshitting? There's really a pathfinder here?" Gil asked, the box of spare parts just as forgotten as the ball Vetra had been throwing. "Can he take me with him?" It was less a joke than actual hope. Gil was tired of being treated like a low-level scrap mechanic when he was actually certified to work on ships and ground vehicles.

Vetra wordlessly nodded. She could cry if she hadn't completely cried herself out over the last couple of weeks. One of the pathfinders made it. Maybe she hadn't made a huge mistake after all. Maybe they could somehow make this work.

She knew one thing was for sure. She wasn't going to sit around in the docks, forging paperwork for people who wanted to sneak birthday gifts to friends or get back belongings they weren't supposed to have yet for the rest of her life, which had now been potentially expanded from "another year or so" back to a turian's natural lifespan. She had to speak to Kesh and figure out how to get herself on his crew, and maybe take a few of her other friends with her, like Gil, as well.

Things were definitely starting to look up.

* * *

 _I posted this to keep my mind off of things while we were under a severe thunderstorm warning/tornado watch. We're alright, but I found out my sister is a Darwin Award contestant when she ran outside with a tablet like, "I'm gonna film da storm!"_


End file.
